Fighting zombies is as much a part of video games as collecting coins in Mario, or madly trying everything in your inventory in a point-and-click adventure. Wolfenstein, as one of the first and most popular FPS titles, represents a huge steppingstone for the industry.

The team behind the latest iteration of the franchise, Machine Games, is attempting to recapture that same sense of joy gamers had when they first encountered the original in the early 1990s.

Based on a hands-on demo played by games.on.net on the show floor, we believe they’re showing good signs of succeeding.

The demo we saw had the series’ main character, William B.J. Blazkowicz, attempt to infiltrate some sort of Nazi compound. The setting was out of context and couldn’t be discerned, but it doesn’t matter – for now, what really matters is the combat.

It feels good. It feels more than good – it feels powerful. Stealthy melee kills are all well and good, but when the action gets going, you’ll be happy to have dual-wielded weapons on your side. Given this game is set in an alternate 1960, the weapons are a little futuristic and strange. It doesn’t matter, however, as they all work well and make you feel like you can own the battlefield. The fact you can dual-wield immediately places you back in the early 1990s with the series’ original. It feels nostalgic, but it’s just different enough to stand on its own feet.

But the combat feels good not just because of the powerful, old-school weapons. The level design itself is open and complex, allowing multiple pathways in skirmishes. We died several times – the game was on a PC but only a gamepad was available to play – and each time the fights occurred differently. AI was smart enough to flank us from various points in the room.

So while the combat was fun enough, a hands-off demo also showed us another perspective of what Machine Games is attempting to accomplish with the new game.

The game is set in a universe where the Nazis successfully developed an atomic bomb, and won the second world war – eventually conquering the entire world using an unknown technology. Whatever it is, it’s given them the ability to have mechs and all sorts of modern-day gizmos in the 1960s.

The first scene we were shown introduced the game’s antagonist, Frau Engle, a Nazi officer, in which the player sits down across from her and is grilled on whether they are a true Aryan or not by playing a little game.

It’s a tense scene, all spoken in German, and really added a sense of palpable dread amongst the crazy setting.

But not all of Machine Games’ emotional points quite hit the mark. A subsequent cutscene also revealed a hint of romance between the player and another character, but it felt out of place in the slightly wacky world.

The sense of humour feels much more at home. After the player derails a train with a scientist inside, he quips to himself, “I’m coming to find you…you fucking Nazi spaceman”.

This is when the new Wolfenstein feels comfortable – when it’s juxtaposing modern design against old-school humour. Machine Games is keen on delivering an entirely singleplayer experience – there is no competitive multiplayer here – but at this point it’s hard to see the story’s more slightly serious fare stacking up against the ridiculous.

From what we’ve seen, though, there’s a strong sense of what made the original game so fun encased in this reimagining.  Just don’t expect anything too deep.

It is with regret that we announce today that games.on.net forum regular and passionate gamer MrMoilT passed away last Tuesday night after a long battle with leukemia.

Our admin brimlad describes MrMoilT as “an avid gamer, passionate and dedicated to all the games that he played,” and that “even in hospital in Melbourne he managed to continue playing games on his laptop and would join us on ts for a chat about his treatment and his passion, gaming”.

I’d like to ask anybody wishing to convey their sympathies to head over to this forum thread. I’ll be closing the comments on this article.

Our sympathies to MrMoilT’s family and loved ones.

Troubled zombie MMO The War Z has apparently figured that a good way to leave all those controversies behind and to stop people confusing them with DayZ or perhaps World War Z is to change their name to Infestation: Survivor Stories.

As explained on the official forums, “Effective today, The War Z has changed its name to Infestation: Survivor Stories. This change has come about primarily as a result of some confusion and trademark issues with a similarly titled property.”

“While we were reluctant to rename the game so long after launch, especially with nearly 1 million registered players, it was ultimately decided to be in the best interest of our existing community as well as future players in order to eliminate confusion. Please rest assured that this will in NO WAY affect you as players. The only difference you will see is the change in logo and website. There will be no interruption of service or change in content.”

Source: Infestion Forums

A brief leak that publicly exposed Valve’s internal project tracking software has resulted in a number of mailing lists used within the company being released.

Notable mailing lists inside Valve include a Half-Life 3 group with 42 employees attached, a Left 4 Dead 3 group with around 70 people attached, and other smaller groups such as “Cries Unheard”, “Microbe Wars” and “The Grange”. Some joke groups also clearly exist such as “WUBWUBWUB”, “gayben” and “yo dawg”.

The list of lists was uncovered by Valvetime.net and has been copied into Pastebin. You can see it here.

Source: Valvetime (Thanks, Stefan)

Australians woke up this morning to the bewildering news that Microsoft had performed a complete about-face on the hotly controversial issue of its Xbox One always-online DRM and game-locking strategies.

In a statement on the official Xbox News site, president Don Mattrick cited the “candid feedback” from gamers to the console’s restrictive policies as the reason for the change.

“Since unveiling our plans for Xbox One, my team and I have heard directly from many of you, read your comments and listened to your feedback. I would like to take the opportunity today to thank you for your assistance in helping us to reshape the future of Xbox One.”

“You told us how much you loved the flexibility you have today with games delivered on disc. The ability to lend, share, and resell these games at your discretion is of incredible importance to you. Also important to you is the freedom to play offline, for any length of time, anywhere in the world.”

The key changes

No online connection required to play single-player games

The once-every-24-hours check-in system has been dropped. The only requirement now is for a one-time internet connection at system setup.

Trading, re-selling and lending will happen exactly as it does today

Microsoft are ditching the restrictions on game lending and selling completely, saying “it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360″.

Gamestop (known here in Australia as EB Games) expressed delight at the news, saying “This is great news for gamers and we applaud Microsoft for understanding consumers and the importance of the pre-owned market.”

Shares in Gamestop rose 6% following this announcement.

Games are now region-free

“Xbox One games will be playable on any Xbox One console — there will be no regional restrictions,” reads the announcement. Time to start finding a good game importer folks, if you haven’t already (something most Australians are already intimately familiar with).

Some always-online based features are gone

Microsoft’s previously-announced policy of being able to share your games digitally with up to nine other “family members” and access them via any console has been scrapped (fortunately, something similar is coming soon to Steam).

You’ll also no longer be able to log into any console with your Xbox LIVE account and play your games there.

Delivered via day-one patch

These changes have been revealed to take effect via a day-one patch which will enable to console to go offline indefinitely.

Thanks to the thirty-seven different people who sent this news in.

Source: Xbox, Kotaku, Polygon

The latest Steam beta has been discovered to contain some interesting text strings hinting at the possibility of game-borrowing appearing in the future.

If you update to the latest beta (Steam > Settings > Beta Participation) and then look in Steam/Public/steamui_english you’ll find the following UI strings:

“SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicense_Title” “Shared game library”
“SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_OwnerText” “Just so you know, your games are currently in use by %borrower%. Playing now will send %borrower% a notice that it’s time to quit.”
“SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_BorrowerText” “This shared game is currently unavailable. Please try again later or buy this game for your own library.”

Exciting times ahead! Hopefully an official announcement isn’t far off.

Source: Facepunch (thanks Stefan, JaMbO)

I’ll always remember Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara as a beeping, flashing arcade cabinet, sitting forgotten in the lobby of Valhalla, one of Perth’s only two Nerd Stores. Nobody ever seemed to play it, but every so often I would drop a coin or two in as I went past on my way to thumb greasily through sourcebooks for games that I, on my pathetic 13-year-old pocket money, could not possibly afford.

Fast forward to 2013: I have no less than 50 Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks on my living room shelf, and Shadow Over Mystara has been bundled together with Tower of Doom and re-released in HD for just $15.

The times, they are a-changin’.

Chronicles of Mystara brings together both 1993’s Tower of Doom and 1996’s Shadow Over Mystara, updating the original game so that it can be played with the two additional classes (Magicu* and Thief) introduced in SoM.  It’s an impressive package, and clearly put together with a lot of love for the originals and an abject refusal to change anything, even the horrific Engrish which pervades most of the strictly awful narrative.

Still, this isn’t a game you play for the narrative. Gameplay wise, Chronicles of Mystara retains the complexity and well-layered combat for which the original arcade releases became so famous (and which took at least $25 of money before you even began to get a grasp on). With a huge variety of items, spells, enemies and moves, combat is still pleasingly technical — but the addition of easy mode and almost unlimited continues makes it a pleasure just to bash through.

Capcom have added a few new things into the mix as well, and one of the best ones is House Rules. You can use these settings to change how the gameplay works, including one that turns you into a vampire so you heal when you inflict damage, one that turns on infinite item durability, and one that sprays huge amounts of gold out of every defeated enemy.

The other is of course drop-in, drop-out co-op gameplay. Powered by the GGPO middleware library, you can just throw yourself into a friend’s game and leave a moment’s notice, and frankly playing CoM on your own holds little appeal.

However, here’s the rub — playing this game on a keyboard is awful. If you’re hoping to get four of your friends together to play, the ones that don’t bring controllers the party are going to be flailing around at the back of the screen getting murdered by goblins. It’s not that it’s unplayable, it’s just super-clunky — if you have a 360 or PS3 controller I highly recommend plugging it in as soon as possible. I played through with a 360 controller and have zero regrets.

All in all, there’s not much to say about Chronicles of Mystara except “Well, it sure is those games you already played ten years ago,” which is, I guess, the highest compliment you can possibly pay to an HD re-release. The updated graphics aren’t spectacularly improved but the rest of the interface is in crisp HD, the addition of extra customisation and characters is neat, and the price is right. Have a go, why don’t you.

Good:

• Well, it sure is those games you already played ten years ago
• Plus some great customisation options

Bad:

• Don’t play it with a keyboard or you will want to hurt yourself and the people around you

Chronicles of Mystara is available on Steam for $14.99.

This review copy provided by the publisher.

*Magic User, I know, but ‘Magicu’ is funnier

The battlegrounds of ancient Rome are reminiscent of Westeros. Yet while the real-time combat may not be quite as up-close-and-brutal as a Game of Thrones style throat-slitting, it’s in the courts of political intrigue — the wheeling, dealing and figurative backstabbing — that the wars of Rome II are won and lost.

Creative Assembly’s E3 presentation of Total War: Rome II focused heavily on the changes made to the part of the game that happens before you even hit the battlefield. In a 20-minute hands-off demo, the developers talked us through how they’ve revamped the series’ strategic layer to reflect political life in ancient Rome and beyond. You have to manage the competing interests of various internal and external factions, Houses and ruling families, adopting sons and marrying off daughters to keep the upper hand in the overall power struggle for control.

This is all tracked in a new system called Political Capital. You can Support, Extort, Discredit and Assassinate the factional leaders in an interlocking effort to secure friends and make life much tougher for your enemies.

Reaching beyond your own borders, this game of thrones is further tracked by the new Relations Panel. Here you can see all the historical and still relevant interactions you’ve had with a foreign leader. It informs you at a glance what actions you’ve taken–both to them and to their allies and enemies–that they either like or condemn. So if you’re wondering why Egypt is unwilling to cooperate on a trade agreement, a quick look at the Relations Panel will provide a number of likely explanations. It’s all reminiscent of the diplomacy screen in Civilization V, albeit stocked with what appears to be even more specific details.

Next, Creative Assembly highlighted the overhauled campaign map. However, calling it a map any more seems like a gross understatement. The strategic world of Rome II has left behind much of what was previously abstracted, instead presenting a gorgeous aerial view of Europe and the Mediterranean in all its geographical glory. Cities sprawl over the countryside as you expand your territory and you can even see key individual buildings appear inside its walls as you order their construction.

Territorial control also extends to the numerous pockets of flora and fauna dotting the world. Take over an area native to elephants or camels, for example, and you’ll be able to train and recruit unique military units that utilise these resources. Similarly, natural and (oddly) man-made wonders can be absorbed into your territory to provide bonuses to your income via increased tourism (though quite how the pyramids of Giza were existing away from any civilised society in the first place is a question for the videogame gods).

Finally, just before we jumped into a short real-time battle, the developers noted that your military has been granted an RPG-like upgrade system. Once you’ve named a division, it can earn Traditions that confer permanent bonuses to any units marching under its banner. These perks, if you prefer, persist even after defeat as new recruits follow in the footsteps of those who came before. Generals, too, are able to be differentiated through a system of personal traits and skills that enable you to tailor their abilities to your playing style or the demands of the scenario.

The battle that followed was too short for us to really pay much attention to new features beyond the obvious graphical improvements, but we did appreciate the ability to pause proceedings at any moment to reassess our options and give new orders. Just personally, as someone who typically prefers to auto-resolve Total War battles and focus on the strategic game, the simple option of pause may make me more willing to get my hands dirty in a scrap.

Rome II is very much what you’d expect: no surprises, no major changes to warrant alarm or concern, just an accumulation of relevant tweaks and considered new features aimed at extending the strategic depth where appropriate.

Bethesda’s Pete Hines has reaffirmed the company’s decision from April last year to put a halt on Prey 2 development, saying that there’s no new information because it’s “simply not good enough”.

“What we said the last time we said anything was that it’s not up to our quality standards,” said Hines to IGN. “It’s simply not good enough. We’re not going to just proceed blindly with something that isn’t good enough. We’ve been very specific about why, and we’ve been very specific about the whats. When that gets addressed and changed or whatever, at that point we can give an update.”

Hines took the chance to comment somewhat on recent rumours that his company had been strong-arming Human Head into losing control of the game.

“Nobody’s disappointment is greater than ours,” he continued. “We spent a lot of time and money and effort trying to make this thing happen and support folks, but at the same time, you just can’t keep throwing money at it. You have to have the discipline to say, ‘it’s not good enough. It’s not hitting the quality bar’.”

“As we said in our last update, it’s not good enough. It’s not where it needs to be. When we have more info than that, we’ll let you know. What is the chance that we have some amazing, unbelievable game and we’re just not talking about it for no reason? Zero.”

“Again, when we have more info on it, we’ll be happy to talk about it. That’s what I can say for now.”

Source: IGN

If you’re feeling cynical about the upcoming Batman: Arkham Origins game, then don’t worry: developers Warner Bros. understand.

“I would say that people have the right to be cynical; they have the option to be cynical,” said WB’s creative director Eric Holmes to Gamespot.

“Come and play the game at one of these events where we bring the game. And I think as soon as you’ve got the pad in your hand, you’re going to see that this game is authentic and uses the same underpinnings and core mechanics of the previous Arkham games.”

Indeed, this was basically exactly what we found when we went hands-on at E3 last week.

Holmes emphasised that the story behind Origins was what would really show players they weren’t just phoning it in.

“I think we have a great story. I can’t tell you too much about, but I can tell you I’m really excited about our story,” Holmes said. “I think it’s a very important Batman story and I think fans are going to love that probably more than any other thing in the game.”

Source: Gamespot

A source inside EA claims that the company has made its entire analysis and review team redundant, according to reports published today.

Around 20 employees formed part of the team, which conducted internal reviews of games from the perspective of outsiders such as games media, analysed Metacritic trends, and generally made sure EA’s games were as presentable as possible before journalists and players got their hands on them.

A former employee took to Twitter to vent her frustrations, but the initial tweet about the entire department being cut has been deleted.

The news follows April’s reveal that EA had cut a massive 10% of its workforce by winding up its Partners program.

Source: Polygon

Gunpoint, the delightful 2D stealth-puzzler-platformer (read our review here) has revealed that its sales figures were enough to recover the development costs in just a few hours.

Creator Tom Francis has revealed that technically it only took 64 seconds to recover the cost of Game Maker, the software used to create the title, but within a few hours his investment costs of time and expertise from others were completely paid off.

Francis has now left writing for PC Gamer to work full time on development, saying “So, I quit my job. In fact, I think I have quit jobs, as a concept.”

“I started Gunpoint as an audition piece to get myself a position at a developer, but designing it has been so creatively satisfying that I no longer want one, and so commercially successful that I’ll never need one.”

Bravo. If you still haven’t played this delightfully clever little game, you can buy it direct from the developer at http://www.gunpointgame.com/. You’ll get a Steam key out of it too, which is nice.

You are upside down.

Your vision is blurry, and the dim light around you isn’t helping. But as your eyes begin to adjust, you see them: bodies. Just like you. Hanging upside down, the blood obviously drained from them like sponges.

This already grim situation is made worse by the clanking buzz of a chainsaw breaking through a human spine. You can’t see it, but blood, muscle and tissue are splattering on the floor.

Soon, a massive brute passes by you to a nearby room, carrying the top off a human body. He begins to mutilate it with a machete.

This is The Evil Within. It’s disgusting, it’s brutal, and survival horror fans are going to love it.

In case you may not have heard, The Evil Within is being made by Shinji Mikami, who created the Resident Evil series. His new studio, Tango Gameworks, has been hard at work creating a new entry in the survival horror genre — a genre which recently has seen more action elements than traditional fans would like.

The Evil Within dispenses with of that. The main character, Sebastian, is a detective who has been sent to investigate some strange happenings at an asylum. Naturally, things go wrong pretty quickly and he’s found himself strung upside down.

It’s refreshing to see the player given no combat options in this early part of the game — there is only running and sneaking from the chainsaw-wielding brute. Some of the small touches are quite nice, actually. When Sebastian opens a door he does so slowly, and checks behind to make sure no one saw him.

This is when things get a little weird.

Sebastian manages to run away, finding his way outside – only to find the asylum has been cut off from the rest of the surrounding area. It looks like an earthquake has destroyed this massive city.

We were also shown a portion of the game from later on, about three-quarters of the way through the main narrative. Sebastian has more weapons now, but even then, his resources are scarce. We saw a scene in which he was forced to defend himself in a house against large groups of oncoming zombie-type enemies. He set a few traps and then backed away from nearby windows, but he had very few bullets and was not going to last long.

There were some other methods of combat, such as using matches to light up enemies. But this was very much a character on the back foot — there will be no Dead Space-style action adventure elements here. Or, at least, we weren’t shown any.

The soundtrack does a lot of good here, stripping back most noise to just the essentials — footsteps and the click of a flashlight. It’s a terrifying experience to watch, and often, quite weird. At one point Sebastian was showered in a river of blood only to find the same hallway dry as a bone after turning on a light.

The demo ended with a massive, six-legged human type creature emerge from a sewer and attack him. Just as the monster was about to bite into his flesh, we cut to black.

Yikes. What we’ve seen of The Evil Within so far is brutal and terrifying. It’s not for those with a light stomach but if you’ve been dying for some real survival horror, this is definitely your cup of tea.

Just Add Water have released some early pre-alpha gameplay footage of the upcoming HD re-release, Abe’s Oddysee New N’ Tasty.

This gameplay footage builds on the last gameplay footage we saw and shows the same amazing crisp animations and total lack of screen transitions. Amazing!

You can download this file for yourself by clicking right here.

Check it out below.

The prominence of AMD components in both next-gen consoles means that Battlefield 4 on PC will also be optimised for AMD, confirmed AMD overnight.

“It makes sense that game developers would focus on AMD hardware with AMD hardware being the backbone of the next console generation,” said AMD in a statement to IGN. “At this time, though, our relationship with DICE and EA is exclusively focused on Battlefield 4 and its performance optimizations for AMD CPUs, GPUs and APUs.”

If you’re worried that your NVIDIA card will be sub-par, AMD confirmed that they “undertake no efforts to prevent our competition from optimizing for games before their release”, with EA chiming in to add that “This does not exclude DICE from working with other partners to ensure players have a great experience across a wide set of PCs for all their titles.”

Source: IGN

Four new multiplayer maps and one new zombies map are coming to Black Ops 2 on July 2 in the ‘Vengeance’ map pack, which has a timed exclusivity deal with Microsoft.

The mas include ‘Cove’, a small island littered with jet wreckage, ‘Detour’, a destroyed suspension bridge, ‘Rush’, a paintball course turned into a combat arena, and ‘Uplink’, a re-imagined version of ‘Summit’ from the original Black Ops, set in the jungle.

‘Buried’ is the zombie map addition, and is set in an abandoned Old West mining town. The ‘Vengeance’ pack also comes with the Ray Gun Mark II, which is apparently “so powerful” that anybody who buys the ‘Vengeance’ pack will be able to use this gun in all other zombies maps.

PC and PS3 players will have to wait as usual — the last two maps packs have taken a month to drip down to other platforms so this will likely be much the same.

Check out the trailer below.

If for some reason you still haven’t played Torchlight, the first installment in Runic Games ARPG series, then now you have literally no excuse as the entire game is free for the next 48 hours.

You can head over to GOG.com and grab it right now. The sequel, should this one be to your liking, can be found here for $19.99 and is well worth your time (our review).

This is all part of GOG.com’s current #NoDRM Summer Sale, with 500 games on sale until July 5. Today’s deals include The Definitive D&D bundle for just $20 (which is obnoxiously good value) and the Alan Wake bundle for just $5 (again, dang).

The upcoming first-person puzzler Magrunner: Dark Pulse is launching on Thursday, seeking to blend sci-fi with the Cthulu Mythos because well why not.

As you can see in the trailer below, it’s got a bit of a Portal vibe to it, assuming of course Portal also featured shoggoths and the Dark Young of Shug-Niggurath.

The current cheapest pre-order price is at GOG.com, where you can grab it for $16.99. It is also available on Steam.

Take a look!

We The Force Studios are a small indie group developing out of Mexico, and they’ve used E3 to announce the upcoming launch of their 2D action-platformer Randall.

Set in a dystopian future where a crystal-like mineral infects the minds of the populace and keeps them docile and afraid, Randall has instead found himself with the ability to read people’s minds — and must use this power to prevent an evil corporation from taking over the world.

Take a look at the trailer below and see what you think — we could be in for a treat.

Source: Polygon

EA deployed Need for Speed Rivals at their E3 conference last week, and for those of you who missed the livestream, you can now catch it here.

It’s one of those “interactive trailers” which are all the rage and allows you to watch a single pursuit from different angles. If it’s not working out, click here to jump to YouTube and watch it there instead.

The game hits on November 19 this year.

Game development in Australia has been given a boost today with the announcement of $6 million in funding, to be divided amongst 10 Australian developers.

The $6 million is the first part of the $20 million package announced last year, to be delivered over the next three years.

The ten successful companies to receive funding were:

• Defiant Development (QLD)
• ODD Games (SA)
• Soap Creative (NSW)
• Tantalus Media (VIC)
• Tin Man Games (VIC
• Torus Games (VIC)
• Twiitch (VIC)
• Uppercut Games (NSW/ACT)
• The Voxel Agents (VIC)
• Wicked Witch Software (VIC)

Data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that employment numbers in the Australian game development sector have fallen from 1431 to 581 people. Hopefully this cash injection can help to bring that number around.

Source: Screen Australia (thanks David)

Jonathan Blow was the most accomplished E3 presenter I saw all show.

While most demos consisted of rehearsed hyperbole, checking off each key message in easily quotable soundbites, Blow instead took his audience on a thoughtful journey of understanding. In doing so he conveyed perfectly what his new game, The Witness, is aiming to deliver to players.

Before I jump into the demo I should note that, along with Supergiant’s Transistor, The Witness is one of the leading lights of Sony’s renewed embrace of indie developers and so the demo we saw was running on the PlayStation 4. However, again as with Supergiant, Blow’s plans for a simultaneous launch on PC aren’t affected by his console-exclusivity deal with Sony. We’ll be playing The Witness on PC when it releases either later this year or early in 2014.

The Witness starts in a tunnel. You walk forward towards a door, upon which sits a panel. You trace a line from left to right across the panel, the door opens, and you step through into a lush garden. Around the garden are several more panels connected by a cable that disappears through long grass and weaves over stone walls. Following the cable will show you the correct order in which to approach the panels, each of which presents a new line-tracing puzzle. Solving a puzzle is about increasing your understanding of the rules of the world, a gradual accumulation of knowledge that can be applied in new ways at each panel.

Blow says he has long been a fan of adventure games, but despite that he finds many standard elements of the genre to be frustrating. He describes The Witness as an adventure game, albeit one that attempts to relieve the frustrations he has with the genre. For one, there is no pixel-hunting in The Witness; you won’t be clicking around the screen to find the right interactive point, but rather each puzzle is framed by its panel. Also, there is no trial-and-error combining of inventory items; you won’t be dragging every item in your pockets onto that locked door, but rather each solution comes from your understanding of the rules of the panel.

The Witness takes place on a large island, much of which is accessible from the very start. Like a gorgeously detailed version of Proteus, you view the island from a first-person perspective and walk around at a leisurely pace — though Blow was keen to drop hints that you may not actually be a person in this world. The panels are the only thing you can interact with on this island, but that’s not to say each puzzle is solved in isolation. Panels are grouped together in areas and your ability to solve the puzzles in an area depend on your capacity to understand how they relate to each other, how the different elements of each combine to introduce new lessons, and how the surrounding environment contributes to both. An early example features a panel depicting a line that forks multiple times, providing one starting point and eight possible end points. Stepping back from the panel you realise that it mirrors a nearby tree where one branch holds a solitary red apple. Thus the soloution sees you tracing a line to the matching fork on the panel.

The above examples may sound simplistic — and, indeed, the solutions are obvious once you know what they are — but Blow says he wants the player’s enjoyment of The Witness to come through that moment of epiphany. He says that shooters and other action games provide pleasure in terms of visual and aural feedback to your actions: successfully aiming the crosshair and pressing the mouse button rewards you with a satisfying death animation and sound effect, and perhaps a further reinforcement of a some loot or an XP boost. Blow says he wants the player to experience a similar — perhaps greater — sensation of pleasure when they realise something about how the world works and can then apply this understanding in solving a puzzle. Impressively, as Blow talked us through the process of arriving at the solutions to the puzzles he demonstrated, we were still able to experience that pleasure of understanding, of having our minds expanding to the possibilities inherent in the world of The Witness.

Blow is an articulate, intelligent developer. The Witness feels smart in the same way Braid felt smart. It feels like a game with a purpose, with a design razor-focused on its core elements. But as with Braid, you can’t help but feel there’s a lot more to it than what Blow is willing to discuss at present. The Witness is already an intriguing prospect and I can’t wait to peel back its layers to reveal what lies at the heart of its island.

The upcoming Salem MMO, which we last covered a year ago, has just announced that they are splitting from Paradox and will be bringing their sandbox MMO to market themselves.

“Effective from July 8, Seatribe will assume full support management and development ownership of Salem: The Crafting MMO,” writes Seatribe on their official forum. “Any decisions taken from that point on will be taken by and communicated through Seatribe to you – the community. Paradox Interactive will start phasing out their involvement in the project from today and on July 8 the game for all intents and purposes will be Seatribe’s to run.”

“We firmly believe this decision is in the best interest of Seatribe, Paradox Interactive and absolutely for the community as you will have a development team working even more direct with you and the game.”

The game will continue to be monetised as it currently is, so players who have already bought in will be taken care of.

Source: PC Gamer

According to reports today, Bethesda showed a brief teaser of Fallout 4 at E3 last week.

We didn’t get to see it (if it existed) but apparently it’s coming in October 2015 for PC and both current- and next-gen consoles.

Reportedly the game has been in development since January 2011 and is set in Boston, with areas including Somerville, Cambridge, and Arlington. If there are any Americans reading this, I hope this makes sense to you.

Local co-op options are reportedly being considered as well — although this whole article is complete speculation, so keep your tinfoil hat firmly on.

Source: Strategy Informer

EA’s Andrew Wilson (seen here at 0:38) has explained that one of the main reasons it hasn’t ported most of its EA Sports range over to PC is because the majority of PC users who would play it won’t be able to run the new engine.

Before you post your PC specs with a scoff, Wilson clarifies that he is aware that high-end gaming PCs exist — but claims these represent a small portion of the people likely to be interested in an EA sports title.

When discussing the recent FIFA 11, Wilson claimed that “Even though there were some PCs on the marketplace that could run that engine, the lion’s share of PCs on the marketplace could not. And the majority of the gamer base that was playing the game on PC did not have a PC spec that would work with that.”

Wilson also claimed that porting the new EA Sports Ignite engine to PC is possible, but could cause some issues. “There needs to be some adjustment in terms of how EA Sports Ignite works to facilitate the open nature of PC architecture, rather than the closed nature of console architecture,” he explained.

Source: Polygon